Canonical funds Linux in a bid to overtake the Mac

It's one thing to talk about open-source software like Linux becoming easy to use and a joy to look at, but it's quite another to actually fund the development of such improvements. Mark Shuttleworth has talked a lot recently about desktop Linux becoming as easy and beautiful as Mac OS X. Now he's ready to fund the talk.

In his introduction to the next Ubuntu release, Jaunty Jackalope, Shuttleworth hints at a vision of Ubuntu's "once-in-a-lifetime chance to shine," and he says, "we want to make sure that the very best thinking across the whole open-source ecosystem is reflected in Ubuntu." Jono Bacon, community manager for Ubuntu, puts a little substance behind Shuttleworth's suggestion, outlining how Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will help guide sponsorship dollars to developers that want to improve Ubuntu.

But it is in this blog entry by Shuttleworth that Canonical's ambition takes its fullest shape:

...Canonical is [increasingly] in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can't imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality. Those teams will publish their Bzr branches in Launchpad and of course submit their work upstream, and participate in upstream sprints and events. Some of the folks we have hired into those positions are familiar contributors in the FLOSS world, others will be developers with relevant technical expertise from other industries.

And so it begins. To date, Novell has been the primary "upstream" contributor to the Linux desktop, though Red Hat and others have also been involved. Unfortunately, these participants have primarily been concerned with the enterprise Linux desktop, which is more utilitarian in its ambition than what I suspect Shuttleworth has in mind.

The Mac has carved its way into the enterprise because it has created devout consumer evangelists who insist upon bringing its aesthetics and utility into the enterprise. For desktop Linux to succeed, it must become much more enjoyable to use. People must want to use it.

Shuttleworth understands this. This is the right step for Canonical. Some open-source developers see aesthetic beauty as a nice complement to the Linux desktop. It's not. It is core, at least if the Linux desktop is to have a prayer of going mainstream.

[odubtaig]

That's one thing Shuttleworth gets that a lot of other distro makers don't. MS has spent a large amount of time and effort getting Windows on the Desktop into schools and home, even turning a blind eye to piracy in a number of cases, purely so that the current generation entering work today will be best trained on and most comfortable with Windows and Office making it in the interests of efficiency for businesses to stick with Windows and Office or face having to train staff in the use of computers and, as we all know, Windows desktops are happiest with Windows servers.

Of course, it's not just at the level of the desktop and getting people au fait with the system to remove the barrier of unfamiliarity that Canonical's working at, Ubuntu's also the cheapest distro to get professionally qualified for with all the material for the adapted version of the LPI available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Training . It's safe to say Mr Shuttleworth's not just going to sit back with a 'build it and they will come' mentality waiting for things to happen, there's a lot of hard work going on to get it to the point where businesses will have to be stupid to not use Ubuntu... just so long as we don't get a bunch of MCSE-a-likes making as much of a mess of running Ubuntu as is currently the case with Windows :o)

[ewelch]

Linux has a long, long way to go to come close to Apple in terms of aesthetics, productivity and mainstream applications that do what people want to catch up. And they have a vastly more complex hardware barrier to get through.

I suspect they have about a 2 percent chance of succeeding considering the increase in adoption of Macs these days is five times the PC side. It's simply not possible to direct open source development in as focused a way as an OS that has one final taste-maker at the top.

[hammeroftruth]

More and more as mainstream OSes get "dumbed down", that is, they dumb it down for people who don't know how to use computers (Vista and Leopard), Linux is going to have a much harder time to penetrate the consumer market. It's a fundamental flaw in not teaching users how to use the command line, thinking that it will help them in the long run. That will actually hurt them whenever a problem arises. Instead of fixing a problem with a couple of commands, they are told to reformat and reinstall their whole operating system and applications and files. There should be more education about how a computer works, instead of how to get your music and movies and word processing done on it.

[The_Decider]

Thanks for reaffirming my belief that Ubuntu is just like Windows.

Ubuntu needs a ton of work under the hood before it needs to get pretty-ed up.

There already exists a solid Linux distro that is at least as aesthetically pleasing as OSX, if not more: openSUSE.

[jragosta]

"There already exists a solid Linux distro that is at least as aesthetically pleasing as OSX, if not more: openSUSE."

That explains why Linux will never catch up to OS X in usability. It never amazes me that people who claim to understand computers think that there's nothing more to an OS than how pretty it looks.

OS X wins not on appearance, but on usability, consistency, and intuitiveness. Linux is miles away.

[odubtaig]

Except there's also a ton of work going on under the hood with Ubuntu which is precisely why it resides on my Laptop and OpenSUSE doesn't. Put simply: it was less difficult to get working.

Given that Ubuntu is widely considered to have the best hardware autodetection and support available amongst Linux distros and is often the least difficult to get into a workable state you can't criticise it 'under the hood' without also criticising every other distro there is.

[The_Decider]

openSUSE has OSX beat in usability.

It can't get any easier or more intuitive. Ubuntu can not compare with it. From hardware support, to installation, to day to day maintenance. Ubuntu is a pig.

[odubtaig]

I think the exact phrase "openSUSE has OSX beat in usability" just disqualified you from having an opinion, espeically one that goes against the opinion of the vast majority of users and people who make a living out of usability.

It also fails to explain away that OpenSUSE died a horrible death on my laptop while Ubuntu didn't. If OpenSUSE is so technically superior and usable then why did I have so much grief with it? Apart from a minor resurgence with 10.3 I've been finding OpenSUSE increasing kludged since 10.0 and 11 hasn't exactly restored my confidence.

[sourceview]

Michael L. Dean [e-mail]
As a sociologist studying technology advances over the last 2 decades, I am amazed at the breadth and depth of ?blindness in perception? of the technology community (i.e. developers and those who fund these developers) in their conclusions regarding what consumers really want. To hold the Apple os/x as the standard is both a strategic and a perceptual blunder which will not reap sufficient conditions for widespread adoption of Ubuntu, or any other flavor of Linux. You guys ?just don?t get it!?

Now there is nothing wrong with throwing money at your obvious deficiencies. This fosters incremental but pedestrian improvements that will leave Windows users remarking ?so what?. Apple is a cult - what they say does not matter in the least. You can?t accomplish what they have done, not without rethinking your goals. What you must do with your wealth Mr. Shuttleworth, is foster a true paradigm shift after Kuhn, which leaves Windows the follower, and Ubuntu the leader and Apple with its cult following. You don?t accomplish that by throwing a few bones to more programmers out there . You accomplish that by bringing true thinkers into the picture ? engineers are not enough. Engineers refine and bring to fruition the concepts of others, rarely do they create.

So Mr. Shuttleworth, back to square one for you. You are bound to disappoint, because you are starting from false premises, an illusory standard, and and your own biases about how the world works.

[odubtaig]

As the builder said to the architect: foundations first, then you can have your edifice.

[jragosta]

"Apple is a cult - what they say does not matter in the least."

You claim to be a sociologist studying technology advances for 20 years, but you managed to destroy any credibility right off the bat. I hope no one's paying good money for your inane comments.

Let's go back twenty years. 1988. Mac OS had windows, mouse, graphical interface, graphical menus, etc. Microsoft was still CLI (mostly - there were a few Windows 1.0 users, but even they used CLI all the time). Fast forward a decade. What UI did most users use? windows, mouse, graphical interface, graphical menus, etc.

Or let's go to the early 90's. Networking Macs was a snap. Networking Windows was a nightmare (our IT guy was in tears for about a week trying to get about 20 Windows computers networked while my Mac took about 10 minutes). Fast forward a decade - networking is built into the OS for everyone.

Jump to mid-90s. Quicktime became a major part of Mac OS, allowing music, video, etc to be integrated into all the applications. 5 years later, the Windows equivalent became standard. (That's not to say that Apple invented video, music, etc on computers, but they were the first to show that there were major advantages to integrating it into the OS).

Or perhaps we can look at the use of computers to manage your music. Virtually everything out there is copied from iTunes.

My favorite line was Windows 95 = Mac OS 1984. There is a lot of truth to that. Simply throwing out anything Apple has done as nothing more than a cult proves beyond any doubt that you are grossly incompetent as a 'sociologist studying technology for 2 decades'.